Her friend regarded such an evening as a ripped-out page, alive with all sorts of suggestions and ideas but mummified, like everything torn from its context, full of the tyranny of that eternally fixed stance that accounts for the uncanny fascination of tableaux vivants, as though life had suddenly been given a sleeping pill and was now standing there stiff, full of inner meaning, sharply outlined, and yet, in sum, making absolutely no sense at all.

7

IN A WEAK MOMENT ULRICH ACQUIRES A NEW MISTRESS

One morning Ulrich came home looking a mess. His clothes hung in shreds, he had to wrap his bruised head in a cold towel, his watch and wallet were gone. He had no idea whether he had been robbed by the three men with whom he had got into a fight or whether a passing Samaritan had quietly lifted them while he lay unconscious on the pavement. He went to bed, and while his battered limbs, tenderly borne up and enveloped, were restored to being, he mulled over his adventure once more.

The three heads had suddenly loomed up in front of him; perhaps he had brushed up against one of the men at that late, lonely hour, for his thoughts had been wandering. But these faces were already set in anger and moved scowling into the circle of the lamplight. At that point he made a mistake. He should have instantly recoiled as if in fear, backing hard into the fellow who had stepped into him, or jabbing an elbow into his stomach, and tried to escape; he could not take on three strong men single-handed. He resisted the idea that the three faces suddenly glaring at him out of the night with rage and scorn were simply after his money, but chose to see them as a spontaneous materialization of free-floating hostility. Even as the hooligans were cursing at him he toyed with the notion that they might not perhaps be hooligans at all but citizens like himself, only slightly tipsy and freed of their inhibitions, whose attention had fastened on his passing form and who now discharged on him the hatred that is always ready and waiting for him or for any stranger, like a thunderstorm in the atmosphere. There were times when he felt something of the sort himself. Regrettably, a great many people nowadays feel antagonistic toward a great many other people. It is a basic trait of civilization that man deeply mistrusts those who are outside his own circle, so it is not only the Teuton who looks down on the Jew but also the soccer player who regards the pianist as an incomprehensible and inferior creature. Ultimately a thing exists only by virtue of its boundaries, which means by a more or less hostile act against its surroundings: without the Pope there would have been no Luther, and without the pagans no Pope, so there is no getting away from the fact that man’s deepest social instinct is his antisocial instinct. Not that Ulrich thought this out in such detail, but he knew this condition of vague atmospheric hostility with which the air of our era is charged, and when it suddenly comes to a head in the form of three strangers who lash out like thunder and lightning and then afterward vanish again forever, it is almost a relief.

In any case, facing three such louts, he apparently indulged in too much thinking. For although the first one who jumped him, anticipated by Ulrich with a blow on the chin, went flying back, the second, who should have been felled in a flash immediately afterward, was only grazed by Ulrich’s fist because a blow from behind with a heavy object had nearly cracked Ulrich’s skull. Ulrich’s knees buckled, and he felt a hand grabbing at him; recovering with that almost unnatural lucidity of the body that usually follows an initial collapse, he struck out at the tangle of strange bodies but was hammered down by fists growing larger all the time.

Satisfied with his analysis of what had gone wrong as primarily an athlete’s slipup—anyone can jump too short on occasion—Ulrich, whose nerves were still in excellent shape, quietly fell asleep, with precisely the same delight in the descending spirals of fading consciousness that he had dimly felt during his defeat.

When he woke up again he checked to make sure he had not been seriously hurt, and considered his experience once again. A brawl always leaves a bad taste in the mouth, that of an overhasty intimacy, as it were, and leaving aside the fact that he had been the one attacked, Ulrich somehow felt that he had behaved improperly. But in what way? Close by those streets where there is a policeman every three hundred paces to avenge the slightest offense against law and order lie other streets that call for the same strength of body and mind as a jungle. Mankind produces Bibles and guns, tuberculosis and tuberculin. It is democratic, with kings and nobles; builds churches and, against the churches, universities; turns cloisters into barracks, but assigns field chaplains to the barracks. It naturally arms hoodlums with lead-filled rubber truncheons to beat a fellow man within an inch of his life and then provides featherbeds for the lonely, mistreated body, like the one now holding Ulrich as if filled with respect and consideration. It is the old story of the contradictions, the inconsistency, and the imperfection of life. It makes us smile or sigh. But not Ulrich. He hated this mixture of resignation and infatuation in regard to life that makes most people put up with its inconsistencies and inadequacies as a doting maiden aunt puts up with a young nephew’s boorishness. Still, he did not immediately leap out of bed when it looked as though he were profiting from the disorderliness of human affairs by lingering there, because in many ways it is only a premature compromise with one’s conscience at the expense of the general cause, a short circuit, an evasion into the private sphere, when one avoids doing wrong and does the right thing for one’s own person instead of working to restore order in the whole scheme of things. In fact, after his involuntary experience Ulrich saw desperately little value even in doing away with guns here, with monarchs there, in making some lesser or greater progress in cutting down on stupidity and viciousness, since the measure of all that is nasty and bad instantly fills up again, as if one leg of the world always slips back when the other pushes forward. One had to find the cause of this, the secret mechanism behind it! How incomparably more important that would be than merely being a good person in accordance with obsolescent moral principles, and so in matters of morality Ulrich was attracted more to service on the general staff than to the everyday heroism of doing good.

At this point he went back in his mind to the sequel of last night’s adventure. As he regained his senses from the beating he had suffered, a cab stopped at the curb; the driver tried to lift up the wounded stranger by the shoulders, and a lady was bending over him with an angelic expression on her face. This child’s picture-book vision, natural to moments of consciousness rising from the depths, soon gave way to reality: the presence of a woman busying herself with him had the effect on Ulrich of a whiff of cologne, superficial and quickening, so that he also instantly knew that he had not been too badly damaged, and tried to rise to his feet with good grace.